Sliding Scales and Sustainability
Some readers may know about my work for the Air Quality Partnership of Lehigh Valley – Berks. In my role as an outreach and communications consultant, I combine my environmental concerns and political science and public relations training (and I often get paid to write).
I’m currently developing a more robust web presence for my environmental work and am looking to connect with like-minded stake-holders, concerned citizens, potential clients, and partners. I have a few web-hosting options and it’s important to me that whatever solution I end up using is a sustainable (in its many senses) one.
SustainableWebsites offers a fairly impressive list of services and uses wind power to offset the energy needs its servers require. Other similar companies (GreenHosting, etc) do much the same.
At the metalocal (I just made that up) level (by which I mean the work I do from my house), though, there are more sustainable solutions. My new MacBook, made from recycled glass, plastic, and metal, comes with iWeb, a very quick and powerful web editing tool that incorporates the intuitive Mac interface (in itself a truly sustainable work environment) into web production. To fully maximize the efficiency of the package, I’d need to host my new site on Mac’s servers. These servers aren’t necessarily “green” in the same way as SW or GH’s might be, but the ease with which websites can be created and updated on the MacBook fit an equally compelling understanding of sustainability. Making my work life as sustainable as possible means letting it fit as seamlessly into my “life” life as is healthy. In the long run, sustainability is about healthy efficiencies and fostering natural connections where the temptation to separate and compartmentalize can be especially strong. My recent switch from LA Fitness (1 mile away) and the JCC (two blocks) is an example of what I mean. Driving to the JCC is better than, say, driving to LA Fitness, but making walking to and from the JCC part of my workout, and making my workout part of my life, is better still.
Hosting through Mac is cheaper than SustainableWebsites or GreenHost, and cost is an obvious factor in the overall sustainability (another meaning still, but an integrated one) of any enterprise. The faith community I’m part of has committed, for reasons of sustainability, to renting existing space from like-minded groups (in our case, the Swain School) and this has meant more money for things that matter (helping neighbor) than for meeting a mortgage, heating and maintaining a building, and digging up greenspace. Even so, the transient nature of the gathering means that there are many moving parts on any given week, and this can work against sustainability in the organic sense if it’s allowed to.
Designing, hosting, and publishing through Mac is more affordable and has fewer moving parts than the other options I’ve mentioned. It’s organic in a metalocal (or should it be super or microlocal?) sense. Sustainability is, I think, about spiraling out from wise personal and family decisions into prudent public commitments. These commitments, really, are the accumulation of hundreds and then thousands of sound, sustainable personal choices for health lived in the public green.
